The New Volkswagen Passat

Taking a break from the Tucson tragedy, I turn to Detroit. There, the North American International Auto Show is occurring as I type, and it is there that Germany's Volkswagen has finally debuted its new intermediate sedan for the North American market, to be built in Tennessee starting this year, as a 2012 model. It is called . . . the Passat.

Yes, the seventh-generation Passat that is not to be sold in the United States and Canada debuted at the Paris Motor Show in September 2010, but the Passat name will be in fact appended to the car to be built in Chattanooga that Volkswagen had code-named the New Midsize Sedan (NMS). Apparently the Passat name carries more of a cache here than the old American names for the earlier Passats of the seventies and eighties - the Dasher and the Quantum, respectively - ever had. The bad news is that the only common trait in both new Passats is the name. The good news is that the differences that distinguish the new North American Passat from its European cousin aren't so bad. In fact, they're really no big deal.

Sure, the new European Passat offers a choice of ten engines - including four-cylinder powerplants with Volkswagen's Turbo Stratified Injection (TSI) system that pressure-injects gasoline straight into the combustion chamber - while the North American Passat gets only three engine choices. But the choice between its 2.5 liter inline five-cylinder engine, a 3.6-liter VR6, or a 140-horsepower TDI diesel is nothing to sneeze at. And the American car will be bigger, too. While the Mark 7 Passat in Europe retains the dimensions of the previous sixth-generation model, ours will be slightly larger, with a length of 191.7 inches, a wheelbase of 110.4 inches and a width of 72.2 inches. This contrasts with the European car's 187.6-inch length, 106.65-inch wheelbase (both about four inches shorter than ours), and 71.7-inch length (half an inch shorter). The heights are identical, at 58 inches each.

This will mean more room for Americans - and go ahead with the jokes that we need more room for our own larger sizes - but it will also mean a level of comfort and familiarity expected in domestic and Asian intermediate sedans. And that is the point. When Volkswagen was America's bestselling import car brand in the sixties, the imported car market was much smaller. Ironically, VW's stature has diminished in the years that the imported car market has grown here - largely because it was the Asians who grew it. Volkswagen's 7 percent market share of the U.S. market in 1970, its peak year in America in terms of sales, would be insignificant in today's market, where import brands constitute nearly half of all cars sold in the United States . . . and Volkswagen's share of the U.S .market is currently about 2 percent. The new Passat, designed to go specifically against the Toyota Camry and the Honda Accord (and also domsetic mid-size cars like the Chevrolet Malibu), is an attempt to reverse that trend and make VW a serious player in the United States rather than just a niche brand for terminal Europhiles like myself. (And being a Europhile in an increasingly multicultural America is politically incorrect anyway! :-D) Volkswagen of America has an ambitious goal of 8 in '18 - they hope to increase their U.S. market share to sales of 800,000 cars in 2018. To do that, they need products that can appeal to American mass taste, not just products that appeal to American niche snobbery (which, ironically enough, is comparable to European mass taste).

The new Jetta, designed with American buyers in mind, is an inexpensive car with little of the interior refinement expected in VWs, along with less stellar performance. VW fans aren't happy. But the Jetta does have very good build quality, and its handling is regarded to be solid enough. So, while that makes it more like a Honda or Toyota than Volkswagen fans would like, it should generate enough sales to keep the much less popular (in America) Golf in the U.S. as a loss leader for VW fans who want a VW that is European to the core. And the new Passat - promised to be "every inch a Volkswagen" by a company rooted in metric measurements - appears to meet that objective with its streamlined styling (shown below) and generous interior appointments. As for the car's ride - the ride being what makes a car a VW - that judgment will have to wait until automotive journalists get the opportunity to actually drive the thing.

So it's not the Passat the Europeans are getting. But it's designed to compete with Toyotas and Hondas while promising to deliver Volkswagen style and substance. So Volkswagen, while designing this car for Americans and Canadians, seems to have imparted a good deal of German character in the new Passat.

At least they won't be naming it the Dasher. :-D